Spearmint2 wrote:As I recall, you can have backup media if you make it yourself from the restore partition on the OEM computers. I distinctly remember doing it for a Vista computer in past and it took 16 CD's at that time, so probably could do onto 4 DVD's.

You're right, it does fit on 4 DVDs, and I did make them as your supposed to do.

Rayland-BH wrote:I switched to Linux because of Win 8/10. My mom bought a cheap HP laptop with Win 8 on it which she hated, and I couldn't phone troubleshoot it for her (couldn't navigate it despite being a Windows user since Win 3.11). Then, a couple years later, it ninja-upgraded itself to Win 10, and essentially became a brick (20+ min to boot). That was the last straw!

I had been experimenting with Linux already because I didn't want to upgrade to 10 myself either, and Mint appeared to be a great distro for a Windows refugee (Spoiler: It is). After determining that it would do everything she needed, I used a Mint 18.1 live DVD to format my Mom's HD (boy, that felt good), installed it, and we all lived happily ever after.

I still run Win 7 alongside Mint 18.3 on both my tower and my laptop, but I much prefer Mint. I spread the gospel of Linux (and Mint specifically) to anyone who will listen, and I look forward to the day I can finally quit Windows for good.

Hear, hear!

For me that will be when Canon publishes drivers for my photo printers...

I have travelled 35629424162.9 miles in my lifetime

One thing I would suggest, create a partition a ~28G partition as /. Partition the rest as /Home.
When the system fails, reinstall and use the exact same username and all your 'stuff' comes back to you.

Rayland-BH wrote:I switched to Linux because of Win 8/10. My mom bought a cheap HP laptop with Win 8 on it which she hated, and I couldn't phone troubleshoot it for her (couldn't navigate it despite being a Windows user since Win 3.11). Then, a couple years later, it ninja-upgraded itself to Win 10, and essentially became a brick (20+ min to boot). That was the last straw!

I had been experimenting with Linux already because I didn't want to upgrade to 10 myself either, and Mint appeared to be a great distro for a Windows refugee (Spoiler: It is). After determining that it would do everything she needed, I used a Mint 18.1 live DVD to format my Mom's HD (boy, that felt good), installed it, and we all lived happily ever after.

I still run Win 7 alongside Mint 18.3 on both my tower and my laptop, but I much prefer Mint. I spread the gospel of Linux (and Mint specifically) to anyone who will listen, and I look forward to the day I can finally quit Windows for good.

Hear, hear!

For me that will be when Canon publishes drivers for my photo printers...

I had difficulties with getting my Canon printer to work under all conditions. pdc_2 suggested I look at Turbo Print as a good driver for Canon printers on Linux. I did and it's outstanding. It's the only thing I ever paid for with my Linux installations but it was worth it. It's better than waiting for Canon to someday respond to the need.

To begin with, I'll add the disclaimer that it's not the only Linux distro I use.
I've used most major distros at this point in time and thought about how the design of each would suit my various needs. On most of my home bound machines (those I don't use portably that have permanent internet access) I usually go with Arch, because I'm kind of lazy and though there's a bit of work with getting it how you want it to begin with, the bleeding edge design makes it easier to keep the software up to date.

Mint is my choice for most of my portable machines though and those tend to be the ones I use the most these days. I favour it for them as it's always felt pretty stable to me, seems to have better initial hardware support than most of the similar alternatives I've tried and it can handle most of the tasks I use regularly from the initial install. Stability is always what I seek when on a machine without net access as if something is broken and I'm away from the internet for a few days, I can't download anything that may be necessary to fix it. I suppose in a sense it also appeals to my laziness thanks to how little I need do after an initial installation.

I still have a copy of the installer someone devised a few years ago, and it still basically works. You have to massage a couple things and do some post-install changes, but it sure simplifies installation.

The reason I have been sticking with Mint is because it is so easy to install, set up, and then make an ISO of your installed system, so you have a USB with all your programs and setting you can take anywhere.
I tired doing that with Arch last year. The finally let me out of the "home" just before Christmas...

I have travelled 35629424162.9 miles in my lifetime

One thing I would suggest, create a partition a ~28G partition as /. Partition the rest as /Home.
When the system fails, reinstall and use the exact same username and all your 'stuff' comes back to you.

I still have a copy of the installer someone devised a few years ago, and it still basically works. You have to massage a couple things and do some post-install changes, but it sure simplifies installation.

The reason I have been sticking with Mint is because it is so easy to install, set up, and then make an ISO of your installed system, so you have a USB with all your programs and setting you can take anywhere.
I tired doing that with Arch last year. The finally let me out of the "home" just before Christmas...

I meant to say "tried", but "tired" works just as well...

I have travelled 35629424162.9 miles in my lifetime

One thing I would suggest, create a partition a ~28G partition as /. Partition the rest as /Home.
When the system fails, reinstall and use the exact same username and all your 'stuff' comes back to you.

Nope. The thing I've found with Arch, is it takes me a bit of effort for the initial setup and then for the most part it just does it's own thing. I never have to install a newer version or try some in-distro upgrading tool which'll probably end up breaking a bunch of things and require a bunch of work. Sure once in a while you might have to install the odd package manually or something, but you'll never have to do another fresh install or version upgrade.

Nope. The thing I've found with Arch, is it takes me a bit of effort for the initial setup and then for the most part it just does it's own thing. I never have to install a newer version or try some in-distro upgrading tool which'll probably end up breaking a bunch of things and require a bunch of work. Sure once in a while you might have to install the odd package manually or something, but you'll never have to do another fresh install or version upgrade.

I install some older packages, some of them are in AUR, and some of those have been orphaned and not updated, so I have to massage the PKGBUILDs to get them to install. It's what probably led to my disagreement with Arch. The story I've told here many times is, when it does the 5th update, it borks my system. and that is always the time my manager calls and says, "Can you look at...?". The third time he said, "Either get something that works, or go back to Windows". Hence my coming back to Mint.

Arch sure has a lot of advantages, and you can basically install just about any package out there, but that leads to breakage. I have another drive with Arch on it; I got it where I wanted it and then turned off the update checker. The only thing I have updated since is the kernel because of the patches, and luckily it did not break my system.

One of the reasons it kept borking in the early days is because I loved Gnome 2, and would spend 2-3 days installing the packages and libraries to make it work after it was abandoned. That was responsible for wrecking my system 3 times, and then they put MATE in the repositories. I don't know exactly what it is that's breaking the installation now, so that's why I lock it in place when I get everything working.

The other thing is a lot of Arch people have a certain "attitude", and while I'm smarter than the average bear, Linux is still just a hobby for me and a way to get away from Windows. I don't need someone calling me a ninny when I ask a question and get comments like "Why don't you just load Windows?" Yes, it's a Windows world, and I was a Help Desk Analyst and have been a computer tech for 25 years, but Linux is still not a way of life for me, even though I have been using it 15 years. I'm a "superuser", not a Guru.

BTW, I love Arch. You can do anything with it. Just too much effort to get what I want. That's why I build it and lock it in place.

I have travelled 35629424162.9 miles in my lifetime

One thing I would suggest, create a partition a ~28G partition as /. Partition the rest as /Home.
When the system fails, reinstall and use the exact same username and all your 'stuff' comes back to you.

I install some older packages, some of them are in AUR, and some of those have been orphaned and not updated, so I have to massage the PKGBUILDs to get them to install. It's what probably led to my disagreement with Arch. The story I've told here many times is, when it does the 5th update, it borks my system. and that is always the time my manager calls and says, "Can you look at...?". The third time he said, "Either get something that works, or go back to Windows". Hence my coming back to Mint.

It might be my usage that is why I've had such an easier time. there's only two real things I use my permanently at home computers for and that's media playback and gaming. Steam, Wine, VLC, Opera and Transmission plus a few native open source Linux games. Some of those things themselves you need to read up on for problems before installing I've found, like the GTK+ client for Transmission cannot connect to the daemon which is handy to know in advance (I usually check ArchWiki for any potential problems with software or hardware as where there are problems there's also often a solution there).

Mint is what I love for any device that I keep on me away from home, particularly laptops/tablets which are what I use the most. Things keep working without much effort on my part and it has the best support for that kind of hardware off the bat that I've ever encountered, but it does mean software upgrades semi-regularly.

I install some older packages, some of them are in AUR, and some of those have been orphaned and not updated, so I have to massage the PKGBUILDs to get them to install. It's what probably led to my disagreement with Arch. The story I've told here many times is, when it does the 5th update, it borks my system. and that is always the time my manager calls and says, "Can you look at...?". The third time he said, "Either get something that works, or go back to Windows". Hence my coming back to Mint.

It might be my usage that is why I've had such an easier time. there's only two real things I use my permanently at home computers for and that's media playback and gaming. Steam, Wine, VLC, Opera and Transmission plus a few native open source Linux games. Some of those things themselves you need to read up on for problems before installing I've found, like the GTK+ client for Transmission cannot connect to the daemon which is handy to know in advance (I usually check ArchWiki for any potential problems with software or hardware as where there are problems there's also often a solution there).

Mint is what I love for any device that I keep on me away from home, particularly laptops/tablets which are what I use the most. Things keep working without much effort on my part and it has the best support for that kind of hardware off the bat that I've ever encountered, but it does mean software upgrades semi-regularly.

Back in the goodle days, SuSE was the King when it came to hardware support. They supported just about anything out there!

I still do love playing with Arch, however!

I have travelled 35629424162.9 miles in my lifetime

One thing I would suggest, create a partition a ~28G partition as /. Partition the rest as /Home.
When the system fails, reinstall and use the exact same username and all your 'stuff' comes back to you.

about 15 years ago, when Vista came along, I told myself "enough is enough" and I started looking for something better that I could control what is going on, and what updates I want it to have.

I tried a LiveCD on all of the different Linux systems at the time, MINT was not one of them, never heard of it or it had not come alive yet???

At that time, they all required that you understand the Command Line, or you couldn't get anything done....
Then about 10 years ago, my Retirement Papers in hand, I started looking again, and read somewhere about a thing called "Mint Cinnamon"............ and that is all it took. I was hooked.... 17.1 was my first one and that is still running on an old Dell laptop.

This ASUS now has 18.3 Cinnamon, Virtuabox, and WinXP and Win7 and Linux Mint MATE 18.3 all running under VM.... I have fallen in love with VM, I get to play with a lot of new toys out there without having to format my HDD and starting all over again. oh what a joy it is.

I don't want to make Bill Gates richer.
I love the freedom of open source and I promote it whenever possible.
I have a rickety old 32 bit laptop that was bogged down with Win 7.
Windoze is a 900 pound gorilla on Valium that can do amazing things in slow motion. Eventually, my computer cracked under the weight of gigabytes of updates and I gave Ubuntu a try. Wow! Life in the fast lane. My old laptop was smoking. I didn't have to have breakfast while Windoze started up. I didn't have to restart every time I installed something. My head spun at the speed that programs loaded, ran and saved. it was truly amazing.
Then Ubuntu cut off 32 bit support - no more updates and rude messages telling me to upgrade. I can't afford a fart on a windy day let alone buy a 64 bit computer!
I thought I was doomed, but researched Linux Mint and their 32 bit support. The more I read, the more excited I became.
Being so far below the poverty line, I can't imagine where that line even is, I had to wait many days for my pathetic download quota to build up enough to grab the 1.8 G ISO.
Now I am running Mint 18.3 and it makes Ubuntu look like Windows 3.1
Many, many, many thanks to the people who make Linux Mint a reality.

Spearmint2 wrote:In those cases, it's easier to just order a copy from http://osdisc.com site.

Afraid I'm in the same boat re. finances; I know what that's like. The cost of a disk would buy nearly 2 weeks supply of cat food!

Zortac wrote:I had to wait many days for my pathetic download quota to build up enough to grab the 1.8 G ISO.d

A download manager should help in this case as it can be paused and resumed (although TBH I don't like doing that). Is free public WiFi not an option where you are? .. that is, if the battery still holds up!

I had received my laptop from my dad that was running windows 7 enterprise and updated it to windows 10 (because I actually liked windows 10) only problem was that after I managed to update it to windows 10 by using the windows creation tool I had to update it so that it had the updated security and whatnot.

That took about 3 days of me trying to download all the security updates from home before I ended up taking it elsewhere to let it finish the updates (because my internet at home isn't that great). After it finished all the downloads and I managed to start downloading programs that I wanted to use the computer started bogging down really quickly and it would take a while before I could really do anything after booting up the computer.

Now I have been using Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon for about a week and I cannot say that I regret it at all...the majority of what I had been using has had the same or an easier to use alternative and from what I can tell my computer is running faster than it did even when I had received it while using windows 7